hopeless, then?" she asked.

[31]

"Quite."

"An entanglement?"

"No. A marriage."

Outwardly she made no sign. Mistress Julia was not one of those simpering women who faint, or scream, or gasp at moments of mental or moral crises. I will grant you that the colour left her cheek, and that her fingers for one brief instant were tightly clutched—no longer gracefully interlaced—under her chin. But this was in order to suppress emotion, not to make a show of it.

There was only a very momentary pause, the while she now, with deliberate carelessness, brushed a rebellious curl back into its place.

"A marriage, my good lord," she said lightly; "nay! you must be jesting—or else mayhap I have misunderstood.—A marriage to render you moody?—Whose marriage could that be?—"

"Mine, Mistress—my marriage," exclaimed Lord Stowmaries, now in tones of truly tragical despair; "curse the fate that brought it about, the parents who willed it, the necessity which forced them to it, and which hath wrecked my life."

Mistress Julia now made no further attempt to hide her fears. Obviously the young man was not jesting. The tone of true misery in his voice was quite unmistakable. It was the suddenness of the blow which hurt her so. This fall from the pinnacle of her golden dreams. For weeks and months now she had never thought of herself in the future as other than the Countess of Stowmaries, chatelaine of Maries Castle, the leader of society both in London and in Newmarket, by virtue of her husband's wealth and position, of her own beauty, tact and grace.

[32] She had even with meticulous care so reorganised her mind and memory, that she could now eliminate from them all recollections of the more humble past—the home at Norwich, the yeoman father, kindly but absorbed in the daily struggle for existence, the busy, somewhat vulgar mother, the sordid existence peculiar to impoverished smaller gentry; then the early marriage with Squire 

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